Currently the market includes a variety of different enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications. It can be difficult and expensive for a company to implement a customized ERP and/or CRM solution. Some companies use in-house development services for such purposes while others utilize outside service providers. An entire industry has developed around the reselling of ERP and CRM applications and associated specialized services.
At least one ERP/CRM application provider currently offers a comprehensive customer engagement methodology that supplements their application offerings by defining processes and disciplines for a particular implementation of their application technology. The methodology includes many hundreds of content pages and metadata describing a range of configuration options and relationships between the content pages. At least a portion of the content is provided in a plurality of different supported languages.
Currently, a client-driven approach is utilized to manage the selection of a limited number of portions of the methodology that are relevant to a given application project, as well the creation of a corresponding collaborative site in a remotely shared work environment. This approach can require installation of the entire methodology content on the local client computer and then utilization of a thick client application to create the collaboration site. In some cases, the cooperation of an administrator of the collaboration site is required to install necessary software upon the server on which the collaboration site is to be hosted. Further, each release/update to the methodology generally requires installation of update components on the local client computer.